My point was is that for virtually every transfer they were using an intermediate print. Either an interpositive or an internegative.
Sure, but those are low contrast film which give the telecine operator a lot of room to adjust the image. It won’t look anything like a release print after it is transferred to videotape.
but the 1982 transfer was specifically a release print in very bad shape.
Lucasfilm is known for cutting corners, but that is low even by their own standards. FYI repeatedly using the Interpositive for this purpose is also likely what led the original film elements to be in such poor shape by 1993 when they did their first photochemical restoration in preparation for the Special Edition.
Also of note, in the interview Mr. Cook states that they didn’t constantly adust the transfer.
That just means that He or Mr Lucas or Gilbert Taylor were not (for the most part) guiding/interfering with the telecine operator’s decisions. And from the way they did some of the PAL transfers it very much appears they were done at the same time using the same settings on the same machines. For example the 1993 release in particular it appears for the first two films anyway that they “rehearsed” the transfer and then used the same rehearsal to make both a NTSC telecine and a PAL telecine. I am guessing though that this wasn’t a unit really intended for PAL which would explain why there’s no extra detail in there (probably “Scanned” at 480 lines and interpolated them), ROTJ on the other hand does show greater detail on PAL which would indicate they used different hardware to do that transfer (maybe it was transferred separately).
So each scene is not individually color corrected. It is one setting for the entire film. So the scene by scene color, saturation, and contrast, at least of the transfers he did, are true to the original print.
They wouldn’t tune every scene, just a handful throughout that might look distracting.